Balanchine & the Lost Muse: Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer - Hardcover

Interesting Facts relating to Balanchine & Lost Muse

1. Balanchine had a father from Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, who during his childhood played him traditional Georgian music. That music features what musicologists consider the oldest polyphonic tradition in the world, and very complicated rhythms - all of which probably meant that Balanchine had been prepared in his childhood to handle the complicated rhythms and melodies of American jazz.

2. Balanchine’s first birthday fell (according to the old Russian pre-revolutionary calendar) on “Bloody Sunday” – January 9th, 1905 – the start of the first Russian revolution of 1905.

3. The Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet (formerly the Imperial Theater School) used to have only 3 high-ceilinged floors and a simple layout; now it has 5 floors and a very complicated layout (you can easily get lost in it).

4. Matilda Kshesinskaya, mistress to the last tsar, Nicholas II, was ruthless as a person, but beguiling onstage as a ballerina.

5. Ballerina Olga Preobrazhenskaya was more important to the formation of what’s called the Vaganova method of training ballet dancers than is generally known – and important, too, to George Balanchine’s beliefs about ballet training.

6. From 1905 on, Isadora Duncan’s “natural” barefoot dancing had a tremendous effect on Russia’s ballet world, and also on the dynamic world of Russian theater.

7. George Balanchine almost emigrated – twice – to Georgia, from Russia, after the revolution. If he’d emigrated to Georgia, he might not have come to America, and ballet history would have been very different.

8. George Balanchine’s first works were several pas de deux done in the modern fashion, with a hint of sex in the dancing.

9. Balanchine’s first group dance, Marche Funebre, was performed in June, 1923, to an audience of soldiers and sailors.

10. Balanchine’s classmate Lidia Ivanova developed a new kind of ballet dancing that seemed spontaneous and “in the moment,” and made audiences almost mad with joy.